1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to backup of data in a computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to provide against the potential failure of the internal hard disk drive of a personal computer or an external hard disk drive or the potential falsification of data by computer viruses, data backup has conventionally been performed to copy data stored in the hard disk drive and store the copied data as backup data in a different storage medium, for example, another hard disk, a CD-RW (Compact Disk Rewritable), or a DLT (Digital Linear Tape) (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-205548). In general, the data backup technique does not overwrite the existing backup data but adds new backup data in the storage medium every time the data backup is performed. This provides multiple restore points.
With a view to enhancing the discrimination of each piece of backup data among the multiple backup data, one proposed technique stores backup data in correlation with information on the date and time when the backup was executed. For the same purpose, another proposed technique uses a backup user interface allowing for the user's entry of any arbitrary character sequence and stores backup data in correlation with the user's entered character sequence via the user interface.
The proposed technique of storing the backup data in correlation with the information on the date and time of backup utilizes only the date and the time as clue information for selection of backup data used for data restoration. There is accordingly a possibility that the user mistakenly selects unsuitable backup data to be used for data restoration. It undesirably takes a long time for the user to select desired backup data.
In the proposed technique of storing the backup data in correlation with the user's entered character string, there is a possibility that each backup data is not readily identifiable by the user's entered character string, due to the restricted number of input characters or the user's insufficient skill. In such cases, the user may not select satisfactory backup data used for data restoration by referring to the character string. This problem is not limited to the personal computer but may be found in any computer, such as a cell-phone or a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant).